


Textured

by Zofiecfield



Category: The Haunting of Bly Manor (TV)
Genre: F/F, Hurt/Comfort, Jamie history, Short One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-11
Updated: 2021-03-11
Packaged: 2021-03-17 22:21:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29973153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zofiecfield/pseuds/Zofiecfield
Summary: They told Jamie she was rough, but she wasn't rough.  Not at all.  Not in Dani's eyes.
Relationships: Dani Clayton/Jamie
Comments: 18
Kudos: 86





	Textured

They told her she was rough.

The kids in the school yard, who shoved and kicked, who assumed she would shove back because of the state of her torn knees and the faint bruising along her cheekbones. 

They heard the slips in her grammar and the rumble of her empty stomach.

They heard the ugly words the town used for her mum and applied them to her with a blunt brush, words defined only as the surge of power in their guts and the flash of pain in her eyes.

They saw all this, only this, and they assumed she was good for the fight. 

She did not shove back. Not at first. 

But then, after enough falls and enough bloodied palms, she did. 

The told her she was rough, and so she showed them rough, rose to meet their fists and the toes of their boots. 

So what if she came from nothing? So what if she was born of dirt, clawing her way up with broken fingernails, muck still clinging to her? She gnashed her teeth and split her knuckles, and showed them what dirt could do.

They forgot all about her soon enough, the children in the school yard. 

They grew and forgot they had ever been so innocently cruel. A rare few became kind, but most tucked that cruelty inside themselves as they grew, fed it with anger and ignorance, to better become their parents. 

The children in the school yard grew.

They forgot, but Jamie did not. 

Jamie’s skin remembered the thunder of fists and her bones remembered the breaking. 

They told her she was rough.

The adults, the men to her left and their women to her right. Men, who laid claim on her youth for slim winnings, who grabbed at her in dark corners and soothed their inadequacies with the flinch of her shoulders, the bend and the snap of her spine. Wives, women in name only, who spat and slapped and dragged her along in their iron grasp to prove she was dust, to keep her in her place, flattened beneath their feet.

Adults, sworn to care for her. Adults, who cared not at all. 

They assumed she could feel nothing through the thick of the skin she’d grown to fit. They looked in her eyes and came up empty. 

There were tears tracking down her cheeks and winces of pain that ached, chronic and not of the body. 

But still, they assumed she felt nothing. Still, they did not see.

She felt everything, every cuss and every scowl of disgust. At first, anyway. 

But then, after too much hurt and too much fear, she learned. 

They told her she was empty and treated her as such, so she hollowed herself. She hid the pieces she could not bear to part with, tucked away for no one to find, and gave away the rest. 

One foot still in childhood, she made herself a cavern for them, just echoes of herself, a cavern for them to fill with their spite and anger, the weight of the world, which they laid on her shoulders to spare themselves for a moment.

When at last she snapped their fingers to weaken their grip on her, when at last she ran, they forgot all about her. 

She was a blur of a face among dozens like her, she was just the same. 

But she wasn’t just the same. There was no one like her, no duplicates among children.

They forgot, but Jamie did not. 

The tense of her shoulders remembered their glaring eyes and the tense in her limbs stayed ready for flight long after.

They told her she was rough.

The women who smiled as they said it, predators and prey alike. The women who salivated over her calloused palms and the scars she bore, who saw the sturdy heft in her narrow bones and _wanted._

The words fell easy, glinted in the dim light of too many bars, tumbled from lips and landed. Sweet flattery and growling hunger. Heads or tails?

They heard the lilt of her voice and liked the picture of a woman who did not belong in this city, a woman who had dragged her way up from nothing. They liked the cut of her, the backstory painted across her chin and wrapped around her shoulders, the tale untold that made them hum and lick their lips and burn for her touch. 

They assumed her body was theirs to ask for, theirs to demand and theirs to take, built to satisfy.

It wasn’t theirs. The body was hers, and only hers, meant to carry her through the world on her own terms. It wasn’t theirs, not at first, anyway. 

But then, after too many lonely nights in the din, too many crowded streets, too many eyes that looked but didn’t see, she let them take it, that body of hers. 

She told them stories that weren’t quite true and let them make their assumptions. She dug her fingers into their skin until they begged, bit down so they could scream into the darkness. Gave them what they asked for, left them sated.

When she tired of their game, tired of the nameless women who expected,

who wanted,

who craved little violences from her, to make them drip and plead and press in harder,

when she tired of them and slipped away,

they forgot all about her. 

They found other bodies to satisfy their itch and their need. 

They forgot, but Jamie did not. 

Their expectant moans and their hungry eyes had stained her skin and left her thin. She could not imagine a different kind of touch.

They told her she was rough, the world and nearly everyone in it, so she let the shell of her toughen to satisfy.

They told her she was rough, and in time, she let herself believe them. She mimicked their words, told herself she was rough, and turned away from herself as she did.

They told her she was rough. 

But she wasn’t. Not at all, not even a little.

They saw the edge of her and understood it to be the whole. They saw the armor she donned against them and mistook it for the heart. 

They called her rough, but it was only their own reflection, glinting back at them from the dented steel she wore. 

She was no such thing. 

Dani told her she was soft. 

Good and kind and worthy. 

Dani looked at her, the sprawl of her limbs and the scars on her skin, and Dani saw.

Dani, who drew fingers, light, across the jagged edges of her, the sharp and hurt and lonely. Jagged edges which sighed and flexed and eased under the pads of Dani’s fingertips. They did not cut, did not bare their teeth. Just sighed and flexed and eased.

Dani told her she was soft. Said it in the whisper of her touch and the weight of her trust.

When Dani met her eyes, pulsing heart in her hands, vulnerable and bare, there was nothing left to do but to respond in kind. 

Dani told her she was soft, and so she set her armor down, laid it aside to rust, having need of it no longer. 

She split herself open, remembered all the pieces of her, long since tucked away. 

Dani dusted them each with care and set them out to be understood for what they were, to be cherished and seen.

Jamie was not rough. 

With Dani, she was no one thing. With Dani, she was everything, all at once. 

Sad and angry, fractured and fragile, good and kind and worthy. Tense and easy. Soft and tender. Rough, too, in a way that fit like old wool, smoothing across her skin like comfort, in a pattern of roses and thorns.

With Dani, she was a hundred thousand things, a hundred thousand textures woven together, each distinct and each bound securely to the others. 

A hundred thousand facets of a single self, and all her, all her own. 

She was no reflection, no mirrored surface to echo back someone else’s tumult, someone else’s need. 

She was only herself, seen clearly though Dani’s eyes, through Dani’s fingertips. 

Dani touched her softly and asked softly to be touched, with no assumption, no eager bracing, no expectation of hardened hands. 

Jamie was not rough, no more than Dani was a fragile thing. 

Dani told her she was soft, whispered it against her skin every day until there were no more days, until Dani and her whispers were lost to the world and its cruelty. 

And then world forgot, but Jamie did not.


End file.
